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Tuesday, October 7, 2008

Eugenics: Alive and Still Kicking...the Same "Unfit" Folks in the Pelvis

Contrary to his party's stated preference for "hands off" governance, a Republican state rep in Louisiana, John LaBruzzo, is calling for finanical incentives so that low-income people will get sterilized and the well-off and educated will have more kids. He may not be calling attention to it, but is there not a certain suspect ethnic/racial as well as class distribution between the two portions of this scheme? And I have to wonder: does Rep. LaBruzzo himself come from any immigrant ethnic or working-class background that he now regards with contempt? Some people do, alas, when they "make it" in America.

This isn't just the specter of eugenics--specter, as if it ever passed away with the Third Reich. It *is* eugenics, and a cardinal principle of it: "More children from the fit, fewer from the unfit." With practically the same definitions of who is and isn't reproductively fit, handed down from the same place: on high.